Blog Archives

What is the first scientific thought in your mind whenever you see a light source or a light beam from any source? Whenever I see a light beam the first thought or question arises in my mind is how can light have such a tremendous speed? The second thought which usually comes in my mind is that if light has such a tremendous speed, then can anyone travel more than the speed of light? The whole article is based on the same concept. I always wanted to clarify this doubt about light. I may go wrong somewhere while writing some concepts. If you find any mistake then do let me know about the same through your comments. Let’s start with the discussion.

We all know that the speed of light is 670616629mph to be precise enough. Take a simple example to understand my concept. The example goes as follows: Suppose you are travelling in a car with a speed of 5m/s. Now you want to travel at 6m/s. So, you pump in more fuel to go a little faster with a speed of 6m/s. But is this possible if you were travelling in a shuttle which is able to travel at the speed of light? Take a simple example again. Example is: Suppose you are travelling in a shuttle which is travelling at 670616628mph. Now you pump in more fuel to travel at 670616629mph which is the speed of light. Now you are travelling at the speed of light. But now is it possible to go further than this speed? Or is the speed of light is just ‘THE’ ultimate speed in the universe? As the speed of light is a ‘physical thing’ we also can’t see of increasing or decreasing it. But is there anything else which can travel with a further speed? If it is then what is it? Let’s go into some further details.

Suppose if we are able to travel at a speed greater than 1mph than that of light. Now the question is that will it affect the shuttle? If the shuttle does not get affected then is there a possibility to go at a further speed? If the shuttle does not get affected then what is the maximum speed one can achieve? If light is the upper limit then why is it so? How does it charge the particles at such a fast rate? And if we are able to travel at a greater speed than that of light than what should we call it? Here I would also like to bring one of the existing concepts of ‘Black-hole’. Black hole is such a powerful thing that it can also attract light which is supposed to have maximum speed. So, if Black-hole can attract at such a great speed then can’t we artificially create such a great speed? If the concept of Black hole actually exists then it is also possible to create such a speed which is also able to attract light. According to the theory of relativity, a Black hole is a region of space from which nothing, even light, can escape. It is called black because it absorbs the entire light incident on it and it reflects nothing. It is a perfectly black body. The life span of a Black hole is infinitesimal but it keeps on multiplying itself at a very high pace. Black hole is also very small in size. But as it keeps on multiplying itself it turns out into a huge mass which attracts anything and everything. So, can’t we use this concept to create an artificial speed which is actually greater than that of light? It would be an ultra speed to travel. How can we use this in day-to-day life? Let’s see further.

If we are able to get a speed higher than that of light then a whole new dimension would open up. We would be able to discover the universe and those hidden mysteries about so many things. So many unanswered questions would have a justified answer. It would also help for advancements in technology and we can also find out if aliens exist or not. If anyone arrives on any conclusions using this piece of information please do let me know. Thanks for reading this article.

The other day I was playing Skyrim and experienced a seriously deathly lag on my Alienware m14x. To notice a lag on my gaming rig was a pretty unusual thing for me since I’m not used to play on a laggy system for almost a year now! Well, before this I had experienced a problem wherein my laptop’s screen froze but my cursor was working. Something was wrong but I just could not figure out what it was. And suddenly laptop again froze while I was playing Skyrim after the painful lag. My internet connection was enabled that time. So, I had to other option than to directly turn it off by long pressing the power button.

After doing this I was put into another state of shock by seeing the BSOD(For non-techies: BSOD means ‘Blue Screen Of Death’). That scared the crap out of me. The system again restarted by itself after the BSOD. And what next?? AGAIN BSOD!! Shit! I was screwed! My dad was just sitting besides me having his lunch and me besides him on a scary way to Blue Hell! And this loop of BSOD continued for 3 times. After that I entered the BIOS mode and tried to change some values there. And at the ‘Exit’ screen of BIOS I chose to restore the default system settings and saved the changes. Now, after a reboot, Windows started to the screen where it asks the user to Launch a Startup repair or to start Windows normally. I preferred to start Windows normally. But then to my surprise I again encountered the BSOD! Laptop restarted again and then again the Blue Screen error came so I decided to use the same trick of entering the BIOS and exiting. After that again the Launch Windows Startup repair or Start Windows normally screen appeared. This time I chose to launch startup repair. (My dad was still eating!) And then my good luck, startup repair fixed the issue and my laptop started to the login screen. And my dad finished his lunch, phew!

I quickly started taking backup of all the important stuff on my hard disk. After taking a backup I decided to run a scan on my laptop since may be this could be a virus or a malware. After about 3 hours my laptop experienced the same freeze again. I thought that there is some problem in my network card and thats why I mentioned in the first paragraph that my internet connection was enabled. Something was seriously wrong with my Alienware m14x. I was worried but then I could only repeat the procedure that I followed previously to login to Windows. I had to go through the BSOD again but fortunately enough I could skip the startup repair. I started thinking, what possibly could cause this issue? And my logic pointed to two things: over-heating or excessive memory(RAM) usage. So, I opened the task manager and observed that my logic was right
for the excessive memory usage. I’ve got 4GB RAM and the RAM usage was almost as high as 90-97%. To simplify the terms, my physical memory, as one can observe from a task manager, was that high. Something was using a lot of RAM. Now the challenge was to find out what was it? I took a little break to eat something. And then got a little bored with the problem so I turned off my laptop and went to my classes for the lecture.

After I came back from classes it was about 9 PM and I worked on the laptop for about 3 hours without any issues of BSOD or screen freeze. But I knew that the problem was still there. It was around 12 AM when I had taken a back up of all the data on my laptop and was totally exhausted now so decided to go to sleep. So, I turned off my system and went to sleep.

The next day I was equipped with a new inspiration to fix this issue and so started off on the quest to do the same. Task manager was the first step that would further act as a great help to solve this issue. Now I had to somehow find which process/service was using up so much of physical memory. So, I went to the Task Manager’s ‘Performance’ tab. There you can observe how many cores your Laptop/PC has. Plus it also shows you the graph of your physical memory and the CPU usage (i.e. usage of cores). In that you can observe the ‘Resource Monitor’ option. I clicked that. Alternatively you can directly go to your ‘Run.exe’ and type in ‘perfmon.exe’ to launch the ‘Resource Monitor’. Now, in ‘Resource Monitor’ there are 5 tabs namely: Overview, CPU, Memory, Disk and Network. I was experiencing problem with excessive memory usage so logically my solution would lie in the ‘Memory’ tab. Now here I observed that one service was using around a 200k something commit memory which was obviously very high. Then I saw its name and it was ‘wmpnetwk.exe’. Alrighty, so I had got the cause of the problem and now was the fixing service.

Nikhil Malankar

Resource Monitor in Task Manager’s Performance tab

Nikhil Malankar

Resource Monitor Window

Well, I would like to explain ‘wmpnetwk.exe’ program in this paragraph. This is Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service and it should not be consuming so much of physical memory on a computer and if it does then you got a hint that something is wrong with it. A 60%+ physical memory for a single service is way too much and this was the reason for the game lag and screen freeze.

If you are experiencing the same issue then here is the solution that I tried:
Click Start and type ‘services.msc’ in the Start Search. This will open up a window wherein you can see all the services that are executed either automatically/automatically(delayed)/disabled on your system.

Search for ‘Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service’ and right-click and select ‘Stop’. This will stop the service. Now again right-click and this time select the ‘Properties’ option. There in the Startup Type select either ‘Manual’ or ‘Disable’. Since I don’t use Windows Media player at all so I chose to disable it for good. I’m a VLC fan.

Nikhil Malankar

Properties Screen of wmpnetwk.exe (warning: Before disabling please make sure that you stop the service)

Problem solved gum gums, u jelly Windows??

I hope this little experience of mine would help you if you ever encounter the same problem. And now Skyrim runs without a lag!! ^_^